You walk around and it might be Westminster or the Manchester Arena or
London Bridge, or even New York in the days after 9/11. In the shadow of
Grenfell Tower, the trappings of grief: the signs pleading for the safe
return of the missing, the vigil candles, the notes and messages left
for the dead. People stand in stunned clusters, talking to each other,
to police, to reporters, telling of the horror they’ve witnessed,
recalling the pain of a friend’s final message or a father whose phone
rang and rang but was never answered.

You recognise the bravery of the emergency services; the solidarity of
the community; the heartening humanity of the volunteer effort. But
something else hovers in the air in this poor, crammed, diverse part of
west London that was not palpable after those terror attacks. It is
pure, righteous fury.

“We’re angry, we’re all angry,” Mercy Banda told me, as she stood on the
steps of Notting Hill methodist church - now transformed into a pop-up
distribution centre, handing out food, drink and masks to guard against
the acrid smoke. Her target was not unexpected, especially given
Friday’s dramatic protest at Kensington town hall. “We blame the
council,” Mercy said. “I don’t think they’ve ever listened to us.”

It wasn’t just Kensington and Chelsea’s culpability for the way the
tower was reclad in flammable material, or the repeated warnings from
residents that were either ignored or, astonishingly, greeted by threats
of legal action.

It was the council’s absence, even now, in the face of this calamity. It
was the fact that it had fallen to volunteers to gather nappies, milk
and bedding; a great and lifesaving duty descending on those armed with
deep wells of sympathy but no experience or expertise in coping with
disaster.

Few wanted to talk about Theresa May, whose first non-visit had just
occurred. But her initial failure to meet survivors and relatives may
well prove terminal, damaging her in the way George W Bush’s flight over
New Orleans - viewing the suffering inflicted by Hurricane Katrina from
30,000 ft - hobbled his presidency till the very end.

For what were the two impressions of May that surfaced so fatefully
during the general election campaign? That she was a coward, ducking
tough questions, and that she was the Maybot, unable to demonstrate
empathy or emotional intelligence. Her initial avoidance of the
community around the stricken tower confirmed her as both. That first
image of her, conferring with officials at a safe distance from the
angry and grieving, and especially its contrast with pictures of Jeremy
Corbyn hugging people in distress, will etch itself into the public
memory.

May’s defenders tried to blame security concerns, yet somehow they did
not stop the 91-year-old Queen heading down to face those who were
hurting. True, on her return to the area on Friday May faced a
barracking (unlike Corbyn or the Queen). But that’s one of the jobs of a
national leader, to provide a focus in moments of collective anguish, to
console the nation and, yes, to address its fears head-on. May is no
leader. And this week proved it.

Still, that is only the most visible, most trivial aspect of the
politics of this disaster. You can ignore those who say it’s wrong, or
too soon, to politicise Grenfell Tower. That’s always the refrain of
those who understand that a raw moment such as this brings great
clarity, suddenly exposing in vivid colour a reality that, for many, may
have been abstract. Such people want the moment to pass, for the
national gaze to move on, so that they can return to business as usual.
Which is why now is exactly the time to talk about what this blaze has
illuminated.

Make no mistake, the other side has not hesitated to press its agendas.
“Were green targets to blame for fire tragedy?” asked the Daily Mail on
its front page. “Did EU regulation mean deadly cladding was used on
Grenfell Tower?” inquired the Express. (Answer: no, that same cladding
is banned in Germany.)

These are desperate efforts from people who know they are on the wrong
side of an epochal argument. It’s clear to those who lived in that
building that what menaced their lives was not Brussels, or action on
climate change, but a local authority and its arm’s length management
company that decided to save a grand total of #4,750 by opting for the
cheaper and more flammable version of cladding for this tower.

And they did that even though the risk was plain to see to anyone paying
attention. The management company RMS, for example, which specialises in
modelling catastrophes risk, has detailed a recent spate of fires in
China involving similar cladding acting as an accelerant, engulfing
entire skyscrapers in flames within three or four minutes.

A blaze in Melbourne in 2014, started by a single discarded cigarette on
a second-floor balcony, spread to the 20th storey in 15 minutes.

So Grenfell Tower threatens to stand forever as a warning against four
of the defining features of our era. First, deregulation - elevated to
an ideal by the free marketeers of Thatcherism and pursued ever since.
Protections for consumers or workers or residents have long been recast
and despised as “red tape”, choking plucky entrepreneurs. A favourite
slogan of the right was the promise of “a bonfire of regulations”. Well,
they got their bonfire all right.

Second, and related, is privatisation, an animating ideal for the right
since the mid-1980s. Grenfell Tower will surely endure as proof that
there are some aspects of our lives that do not belong in the realm of
profit. The outrage I saw was fuelled by years of frustration felt by
people who found their homes managed by an unresponsive company, rather
than by elected officials they could throw out.

Third comes austerity, which has depleted the ranks of housing officers
and safety inspectors across the country. Hardly an excuse in the Royal
Borough, mind you, which is said to have #300m sitting in a contingency
fund.

But most obviously, Grenfell Tower is a story of inequality, of the poor
herded into a cramped building made unsafe because it was prettified to
improve the view of the nearby rich. One woman I met wondered if the
fire had been started “deliberately, to get rid of us all”. She
instantly withdrew that allegation, ashamed of herself for saying it.
“But that’s what people feel,” she said.

Grenfell Tower should mark a point of no return. No return to the
frenzied deregulation, cost-cutting and rampant inequality of the last
four decades. These are not new evils. They have been lurking for many
years. But it took the light of a burning building for the whole nation
to see them.

We have a favour to ask

We want to keep our publication as available as we can, so we need to ask for your help. Irish Republican News takes time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe it makes a difference.
If everyone who reads our website helps fund it, our future would be much more secure.

For as little as £1, you can support Irish Republican News – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.